So, there’s this hibachi place near my house that’s pretty nice and is sort of a special occasion type of place if something good happens and my family is feeling like hibachi. I heard back from Northeastern sometime in March and it was clearly my best choice so we concluded that I was actually going to attend college and that warranted a celebratory hibachi dinner. Naturally, my whole family and myself started thinking, “Wow, what is Grant actually going to do in the real world?”
Obviously, I did not have the answer to that question; I had no idea what I wanted to do. I actually put down English on my application because I love to read and I had a couple of awesome English electives in high school. So, we brainstormed for a bit about what I could major in and what implications that would have on my career and essentially figured out that I really didn’t know what to do and that I have a broad range of interests. Before our chef even came to the table, we had something like 10-15 suggestions for majors, which is far too many to consider, so we decided to eat and think about it later.
After we ate, Dad went back on his phone and started looking at different majors at Northeastern. He threw out a few suggestions but none of them really stuck, and I knew I did not want to get involved in engineering because math has never really been my thing. Just as we were getting ready to leave, Dad picked his head up and said, “Hey, this kinda sounds like you, check it out” and he showed me the page for Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE).
Initially, I thought that there was too much in it and that PPE would not really be applicable to jobs in the future but after thinking about it I realized that it is the perfect combination of disciplines to be applicable in many different fields.
I wasn’t sure if it would really appeal to me but I realized that I could still read and write like I would’ve with English while learning more about society and our government in PPE. This reflection led me to agree with Dad’s suggestion (which happens rarely if you can believe it.)
It is now a year and a half later and I’m still a PPE major, loving my classes and everything I’ve learned. As it turns out that PPE is applicable to many different disciplines, and I’ll be starting my first co-op in spring 2018 at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center working on their Cleantech and Water Innovation team. I will be using what I’ve learned in PPE about how government and political optics relate to economic initiatives and how ethics and justice come into play in something so fundamental as clean water in the state of Massachusetts. I’m really looking forward to starting co-op and to use what I’ve learned at Northeastern as a PPE major and student in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
This blog post was written by Grant Sherman, a second-year Politics, Philosophy, and Economics major with a minor in Business Administration. You can contact him at sherman.gr@husky.neu.edu.
